Body Templates
Body Templates describe and gear characters towards particular physical appearances. Some people are fat, some people aren't fat enough, and others spend hours sculpting their appearance into their desired image of themselves. All of these things say as much about a person's motivations and habits as they do their physical capabilities, and so Body templates affect both physical and mental Characteristics. The available Body Templates are: * Athletic: The character is in great physical condition and light on their feet, but their conditioning comes at the cost of time they could spend sharpening their mind. * Dwarf: The character is of unusually small stature, making them more agile at the cost of physical strength. * Giant: The character is of unusually large stature, making them clumsy but physically imposing. * Muscular: The character spends most of their time working out and maintaining muscle mass. They're much stronger than the average character, but all that time spent working out damages the character's intelligence. * Overweight: The character spends so much time developing their mind and will as they neglect their physical well-being, gaining fat, losing agility, and damaging their cardio-vascular system in exchange for more time studying. * Skinny: The character is underweight. Their lack of muscle mass hurts their physical strength, and they might be insecure about their image. Players can potentially take 2 or more Body Templates, within the following guidelines: * The Dwarf and Giant Templates cannot be mixed, but they can be taken along with any of the other Body Templates, since all they describe are changes in height. * The Athletic and Muscular Templates exclude each other, but they can individually be combined with the Dwarf, Giant, Overweight, and Skinny Templates * The Overweight and Skinny Templates cannot both be applied to the same character, but they can accompany any other template. If the Game Master chooses, they can give or take away Body Templates based on physical conditioning, such as the Athletic and Muscular Templates, based on the actions characters take during their downtime. Characters starting as Overweight can shed their excess weight and become muscular, Skinny characters can put on some pounds to gain strength, and Athletic characters can lose their conditioning if they don't work out frequently. If the Game Master wants to construct additional Body Templates, they should consider the following: * A person's physical condition says as much about their mental state as it does their bodily health. Someone who isn't physically fit probably spends more time sharpening their mind, and those with weight problems, whether it's being over or under weight, might communicate insecurities about the person's body. * The Athletic Template provided above is extremely general and doesn't specify what activities the character's physical conditioning is geared towards. If the character is meant to be a professional athlete, such as a hockey player or martial artist, their stats are going to be astonishingly different from other types of athletes because of what sport they play. American football players need more strength than European football players, who are going to be more dexterous. Light-weight boxers are going to be more agile than heavy-weights, who are in turn going to be much more massive to compete with other heavy-hitters. * Templates meant to address characters of differing heights, such as the Dwarf and Giant Templates, are going to change the character's caps for Characteristics. Larger character are going to have higher Strength caps since they have greater muscle mass, smaller character are going to have a higher Dexterity because of their finer motor controls, and heavier-set characters are going to have higher Body to reflex their pain threshold. ** The cap increases from the Dwarf and Giant Templates stack with those from Species Templates, as larger members of already big animal species are going to have an even higher capacity for Strength, while the tiniest of the smaller species will have even more Dexterity.